I often tell my girls that all you need to succeed in life is duct tape and kindness. After reading a recent commencement speech by Chief Justice John Roberts, I think I'll add bad luck to the list.

The speech, given to his son's ninth-grade class, is getting clicks online not just because the head of the U.S. Supreme Court quotes Bob Dylan and Socrates, but because Roberts offers some unconventional wisdom.

"I hope that you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice," he says. "I hope that you will suffer betrayal, because that will teach you the importance of loyalty."

Instead of wishing the privileged young men good luck, he wishes them, at least from time to time, bad luck, "so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved, either."

Only Malcolm Gladwell, author of the 2008 best-seller "Outliers," could say it better.

The point made by Gladwell and Roberts - that success is not merely a product of merit but of circumstance - adds complexity to the American notion that anyone who works hard enough will make it big.

Some do, of course, despite tremendous odds. They're the outliers. But at some point, they had some help.

A couple of weeks ago, I spent several days in New England with two busloads of outliers, high-performing Houston high school students who weren't born into wealth or privilege. They are aiming to attend elite colleges despite coming from mostly minority, low-income families with parents who may not speak English.

I began writing about the program, EMERGE Fellowship, in 2013 when co-founder Rick Cruz was getting the nonprofit off the ground. Cruz, himself a Yale graduate, was teaching elementary math at a Houston public school when he began to realize how many bright, motivated students were missing opportunities to attend college because they had no one to guide them through the applications, testing, or even selecting the right courses years in advance to qualify at top-tier universities. He also realized that elite colleges, unlike some state-funded schools close to home, have the resources to support first-generation students, counsel them through the academic and emotional challenges of college, and vastly increase the likelihood of their graduation.

EMERGE fills the void, and more, even taking students on tours to visit colleges with more prestige and beauty than they could have imagined. The students bring the merit; EMERGE provides the circumstance. And even that circumstance requires some good luck. Of 1,400 applicants, only 270 were selected for the program this past year.

Games and tears

On our trip, students who seldom leave their Houston neighborhoods boarded a plane. Driving through western Massachusetts, they marveled out the bus windows at mountains that rivaled skyscrapers. They balanced sessions with college staff on financial aid and admissions with exercises that helped them bond with peers and chaperones. Those ranged from old-fashioned potato sack races to a soul-baring assignment in which each student drew a "life map" with symbols that defined his or her experiences. Tears flowed as students revealed struggles: pressure to succeed, bouts of homelessness, parents who don't talk. Chaperones - unofficial mentors - offered an ear, and the kind of understanding and encouragement that might be scarce at home.

In sessions with college staff, the questions were overwhelmingly about money - whether the school is "need-aware," for instance, or "need-blind," meaning the college doesn't consider whether you can pay before deciding to let you in. EMERGE targets colleges and universities that meet a certain threshold and many that offer full rides for students whose families earn around $70-80,000.

Some schools we toured cover everything from books to a winter coat- a real one, for a real winter the likes of which Houston has never seen. Other perks seemed almost unbelievable - to the kids, and to me, a graduate of that big state school in Austin. Things such as free music lessons or study-abroad programs whose costs are included in regular tuition and financial aid packages. Yale provides a personal librarian to every freshman. One tiny, picturesque school, Williams College, at the base of a mountain, has a winter study period in which students can take fun classes such as math of Legos or make up their own class, or - as one student did - talk the school into funding a trip to Antarctica so she could study penguins.

Share obstacles

Students dutifully took notes as admissions officials doled out advice and even allowed students to critique real applications and try to figure out which got in. On essays: project your unique voice, energy and even vulnerability in a personal narrative. On SAT scores: they're not everything, sometimes they're even optional, but re-taking the test to improve your score shows commitment. On challenging courses: max out on what your school has to offer, even if it's not that much.

Most importantly, students were encouraged to provide context in their applications, as to the personal obstacles they had overcome in their young lives - everything from caring for siblings to struggling with undocumented immigration status.

Those obstacles, and the grit it took to overcome them, college staff explained, could be a student's ticket in.

The trip was eye-opening for 16-year-old Elizabeth Gonzalez, who said she tends to be shy in groups and was nervous about going so far from home.

"It was a life-changing moment on a personal level and academically," said Gonzalez, an East Early College High School student who kept adjusting glasses that were missing a temple on one side. "You learn that you have a chance."

She wasn't sure where she wanted to go - someplace small, she said, and she was impressed with the all-women school, Smith College. But she no longer felt alone in her quest.

Julissa Alcantar-Martinez, principal at Northside High School, said she has chaperoned several of these college tours so she can learn how to better prepare her students back home, including the ones who didn't make the cut for EMERGE. She's picked up helpful tips: MIT won't even consider applicants if they haven't taken advanced calculus, so she added it to her offerings. She learned about a common application that saves her students money over applying to colleges individually.

She's been told that her students should speak more forcefully and learn how to work a room. She keeps that in mind when she's helping them prepare for interviews.

I ask her why colleges such as Harvard or Yale, which pick from the cream of top performers, would try so hard to lure disadvantaged kids from some of the roughest schools in Houston.

Because one of those kids could discover the cure for cancer, she says. Because the kid whose parents didn't have the money to pay for SAT prep may have been balancing a night job that taught him about hard work, determination and cooperation, skills that can't be learned in a book.

"I think they recognize that we haven't even tapped out on the potential in this country," she said. "The economic divide is huge. If we don't touch some of these kids and offer them opportunity, they're never going to leave their neighborhoods."

And they may never leave the reluctant parents who might not have wanted them to go in the first place. Some, the principal says, even try to dissuade their children from attending college, for many reasons: money, fear, pride.

"There's a lot of that crabbing effect," she says. "If you're going to go, I'm going to pull you back down because you're not better than us. So, we teach kids: don't feel guilty. You've got an opportunity that you've earned. It's time to go."

Struggled academically

Luz DeLeon, a 19-year-old Northside graduate, sat at the base of an auditorium at Skidmore where the walls were hung with golden framed portraits of scholars in academic garb - all older, all white, all male except for one. She told the students how she had been in their place, in the EMERGE program, and had accepted Skidmore's offer without even telling her parents. How she had breezed through high school, but struggled some academically at the elite school.

"You have to realize, other students may have been able to go to a private school, or have a private tutor," DeLeon told them. "Even if you feel like you're not smart enough, not good enough, you're going to be OK."

Well, yes, with a little help.

We can't control luck - good or bad. It is the way we respond that makes all the difference.

Lisa Falkenberg is the Chronicle’s vice president/editor of opinion. A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist with more than 20 years’ experience, Falkenberg leads the editorial board and the paper’s opinion and outlook sections, including letters, op-eds and Gray Matters.

Falkenberg wrote a metro column at the Chronicle for more than a decade that explored a range of topics, including education, criminal justice and state, local and national politics. In 2015, Falkenberg was awarded the Pulitzer for commentary, as well as the American Society of News Editors’ Mike Royko Award for Commentary/Column Writing for a series that exposed a wrongful conviction in a death case and led Texas lawmakers to reform the grand jury system. She was a Pulitzer finalist in 2014.

Raised in Seguin, Texas, Falkenberg is the daughter of a truck driver and a homemaker, and the first in her family to go to college. She earned a journalism degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 2000. She started her career at The Associated Press, working in the Austin and Dallas bureaus. In 2004, Falkenberg was named Texas AP Writer of the Year.

She joined the Chronicle in 2007 as a roving state correspondent based in Austin.

Falkenberg has mentored journalism students through the Chronicle’s high school journalism program and volunteered with the News Literacy Project. She is a fellow with the British-American Project and has completed a fellowship at Loyola’s Journalist Law School in Los Angeles.